Dr. Peter Mani (Switzerland)

Dr. Peter Mani is CEO of tecrisk GmbH in Switzerland specialized on scientific technical risk analysis, Project Risk Management, and consulting and risk analysis for high containment facilities. He held leading positions in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Electromagnetic Compatibility and in Biosafety. He was a member of the ESA Planetary Protection Working Group, the International Mars Architecture for Return of Samples, the International Mars Exploration Working Group and the ESA Sample Return Study Group.

He provided studies on Mars sample return bio-containment facilities and other Mars related studies for ESA.

Peter started as an airplane technician, holds a diploma as mechanical engineer, a master in microbiology and a PhD in high energy physics. In the early 1980's he participated in the CERN experiment leading to the detection of the vector bosons W and Z and an experiment on a search for free quarks, to verify that free quarks are always confined within elementary particles. He worked in Japan at the National High Energy Institute and back in Switzerland he became head of a research group working in the field of Nuclear Electro Magnetic Pulse on electronic equipment and airplanes.

In 1998 he founded tecrisk and was involved worldwide in consulting for high containment facilities for the research with dangerous organisms. In this function he became involved in Mars sample return facility issues and served for several years in the Planetary Protection Working Group of ESA and participated in different organizations and working groups. He is a member of COSPAR and several Risk Analysis organizations. His main field is now risk analysis and simulation of complex systems. He is currently working on a theoretical study on how to sub-sample Mars probes in order to optimize the biohazard test for the release of Mars samples from a bio-containment facility to open research institutes.

"Since reading as a student the phantasmic fiction The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams in 1979 to the newest research on bacterial or endospore hitchhikers in space, the problem of compartmentation and the fact that living things seem always to exist inside some sort of bag, and therefore life could be seen as a self-bounded system bounded by its own material has lead me to the interest on all kind of containment."